


look at this bruise: we aren't made of dreams, we are skin and bone and blood (does that scare you?)

by kwritten



Series: you and me and my ghost makes one [1]
Category: All For the Game - Nora Sakavic, His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 06:12:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7255717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a series of ficlets of canon as if these kids had daemons</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. neil: what aren't you waiting for?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [clytemnestras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/gifts).



Settling in to one form is a bit like telling the world: _I'm made, I'm solid, you can't change me_. So the fact that Nathaniel passed through puberty and beyond with a daemon still capable of shifting forms didn't strike him as all that odd. Pat made sure to never change forms (too much) when they were settled in a place. Or to speak much.  
  
Too much had always been made over the fact of Pat's gender.  
  
A fact that mattered less and less to Nathaniel as he grew older. (A fact that had never really mattered to him, but he came home with less bloody noses from fights with people to whom Pat's nature _did_ matter.)  
  
When his name changed, Pat mirrored the change that was needed. Always something simple and soft, something that people didn't notice, something that didn't call attention to either of them.  
  
Neil had been accompanied by a sleek dog with a red coat and long snout and high-pitched voice. People smiled at Pat, but didn't remember them. Dogs were easy to forget.  
  
And a skinny boy with a dog for a daemon was no one to fret over.  
  
When they entered Foxhole Court, Pat started to shrink into themselves. It wasn't an adjustment that anyone would notice right away, as they began to get smaller and smaller day by day.  
  
By the time Neil signed the papers saying that he was Neil forever, Pat's voice had deepened to a lovely baritone and they slept curled up in Neil's lap as a red fox.  
  
Neither one of them needed to ever change again.  
  
(And if the newspapers and tabloids forever teased Neil for Pat's form - a fox for a Fox - he didn't really give a shit.)


	2. andrew: no one ever said you had to be the thing you are, you just are

When he was younger, he wanted Eliza to be big - bigger than anyone or anything around - big enough to scare all the kids in every foster home and wrap around him when he slept so that no one could get to him. He would show her pictures of 50-foot long pythons and polar bears and mighty lions with golden eyes and she would peer at the images with wide eyes, her tiny body curled around his arm in the form of a garter snake or squirrel or small cat.   
  
The first time he was hurt he flung her into the corner and didn't even wince when her small body hit the wall.   
  
"THIS IS YOUR FAULT" he'd scream at her while she stared balefully back. Never rising to meet his temper. Never moving or blinking.   
  
When she settled into the form of a white stoat on his thirteenth birthday, he sneered at her and threw abuses her way as if that would somehow change something about him. He let her hide away in oversized coats and backpacks and sometimes she could be seen slithering out from the ankle of his jeans.   
  
If there was a creature that spoke less than Andrew Minyard, it was his silent white daemon with her pale blue eyes. Even as children, they didn't spend time jabbering at each other, they lived in a silence that made him the object of ridicule and suspicion.   
  
Everyone made a confidant of their daemon, spoke aloud things that you'd never say to another living thing.   
  
The first time Drake touched him, Eliza spent a week wrapped around the back of Andrew's neck like a scarf and they didn't speak to each other for much longer than that. She didn't even hiss or raise the hair on the back of her neck when Drake came back for more. If Andrew resented this, Drake found it hilarious and even tried to scratch behind her ear.   
  
The day after Aaron's mother's funeral, Nicky saw Eliza whisper something in Andrew's ear and he barked out a laugh that almost sounded genuine. It was the only time he ever saw them have a conversation.   
  
When they came to pick him up from the psychiatric hospital, Eliza lingered behind them, keeping pace with Pat's happy, tripping feet. No one saw them - one white and one red, small and inconspicuous with sharp teeth and long tails, brushing their shoulders up against each other's quietly.   
  
  
  
  
_"Well my mother's dead."_  
  
"Well," Eliza sat primly on his shoulder. "One of us has to be a badass I guess."  
  
  
  
  
In a hotel room, just a few short years later, Andrew sat in a corner with a fox beside him, while Eliza wrapped herself around the neck of a man more bruise than flesh.   
  
One of them had to be soft.


	3. renee: knives aren't everything (smiles are everything else)

There are rumors that only witches can separate from their daemons over long distances. Stories to tell children of heartless women and men seeking power ripping and tearing themselves from their daemons by chaining them up and walking away from them without looking back. Terrible urban legends of daemons that get lost and hunt the world for the other half of their soul, crying out in the night and shivering in the cold.   
  
Even if you don't believe in witches, you are taught that separation from a daemon can only happen when a person willingly _chooses_ to inflict pain upon the poor creature that exists only to comfort and love them. It's sacrilege - it's terrible - it's inhumane. It's a process to be avoided at all costs.   
  
It's all bullshit.   
  
The warnings, the urban legends, the ghost stories. The presumption that a daemon can only leave your side if you willfully hurt it first.   
  
Renee knows this first hand.   
  
The truth is - pain can drive the daemon away in one fell swoop, send them tumbling thousands of miles away - and there's no fucking choice in the matter at all.   
  
Most people presume - looking at Renee's smile and colorful hair and the cross around her neck - that her daemon is a mouse that hides in her pocket, or a hamster that burrows in her purse.   
  
They don't know that a man put a knife in her hand and smiled at her and threw her daemon halfway across the Atlantic and changed every part of her skin and her heart and made her darling Enoch fly for weeks through rain and snow to get back to her.   
  
They don't know that Enoch is a large raven - stronger than an eagle and twice as large as a buzzard with sharp talons and a sharp wit and eyes black as night. They don't know that Enoch soars in the sky above their sight of vision and she can feel the wind on his wings as if they were her own.   
  
They think she is small and smiles and soft platitudes.   
  
Very few people know the might of a soft smile, or the power of a small girl with a large bird perched on her shoulder.


End file.
